Joanna Rotkin and her partner, Glen Kalen, were nestled in their home in Jamestown when it started raining one afternoon in September 2013. It kept on raining. And then it rained some more.

Days into the downpour, the couple began hearing parts of the land around their house giving way.

"We went outside and we were surrounded by water," Rotkin recalled recently. "We don't have a lot of water where we live. There is a little spring that maybe ran for a week each year. But when the flood happened, we had the Grand Canyon."

For two days, the couple were trapped in their home, cut off from their neighbors in the small mountain town northwest of Boulder.

"Of course, we had no food in the house; I was supposed to go shopping that day," she recalled, smiling. "We ate Skippy's peanut butter."

Eventually, Rotkin — a dancer/choreographer and teacher — was airlifted by helicopter to Boulder so she could perform and teach classes. Kalen stayed behind to tend to the home and join in the effort to help neighbors that sprang up in Jamestown.

Theirs is a familiar story from the 100-year flood that devastated parts of Boulder County and beyond in 2013. The flooding resulted in four deaths, destroyed 345 homes and damaged 557 more, and the cost to replace county roads was estimated at $100 million to $150 million, according to the Boulder County Office of Emergency Management.

Rotkin plans to tell her story Sunday at the bimonthly Truth Be Told Story Slam at Shine Restaurant & Gathering Place in Boulder.

She will be one of 10 people who will share personal stories around the theme of "storm." The event kicks off the popular 2-year-old story slam's "All Stories" initiative — a quest to hear from new voices and unearth uniquely Boulder stories.

During the next eight months TBT will host workshops in Lyons and Jamestown centered on the storm theme. Next summer, TBT will collaborate with the National Center for Atmospheric Research on a days-long workshop for teenagers about the science of weather, which will culminate with a story slam for teens.

Walker and artistic partner Nina Rolle began the story slam in 2013. Since then, TBT has proved a hit with locals and most of the bimonthly slams have sold out.

Each slam features a handful of invited storytellers, as well as slots for people who show up the evening of the show to sign up and tell their own story. Each story is five minutes or shorter, and each story must be true and personal. Audiences score the storytellers in a variety of categories, and slam winners compete at the end of a story-slam season for top prize. The slams also feature music by Rolle and various artists.

As a way to help people hone their stories for the "All Stories" project, and in an effort to facilitate storytelling, TBT recently has begun a series of smaller, more informal gatherings it calls "table talks." The table talks, which are held at area coffee shops or watering holes, are for groups of eight to 10 people.

"It's just sitting down and shooting the breeze," Rolle said. "It's a whole different thing from getting on stage and being judged."

Added Walker, "A lot of people can be intimidated by going up to the stage to tell a story, but they still have a story they want to share. So (sharing at a table talk) has worked out."

Some people, however, enjoy competing on the story-slam stage. Traci Brown, a former professional cyclist who lives in Boulder, is one such person. Now a motivational speaker, Brown has won past TBT events and will share a story Sunday.

"As this (story slam) experiment is growing, the stories are getting markedly better," Brown said. "The good storytellers are coming out of the woodwork. That's really cool to see happen."

Brown met Rolle, a neighbor in south Boulder, because of the 2013 flooding.

"We moved in the week before (the flood) and our neighborhood got hit really hard," Brown said. "We hadn't really met anyone and all the neighbors were out digging trenches, and so were we. That's how we ended up meeting."

Heather Grimes, of Louisville, is another featured storyteller at Sunday's slam. A veteran TBT storyteller, she enjoys the intimacy that sharing personal stories can bring during a story slam.

"There's something that's genuine and unrehearsed about storytelling. I think that's entertaining," she said. "I love doing it because I'm a writer. I write on paper. There's something different about getting up in front of people and telling a story. There are no edits, no drafts. You do it and it's done. There's something clean about it."

While Sunday's story theme is storm, Rolle doesn't expect that all the stories will be about the 2013 flood.

"There's also the internal storm — the tempest in a teapot," she said.

Rotkin said her story will actually be a love story. She and Kalen had moved in together in Jamestown in 2003. A few months later, the Overland Fire devoured their home. Ten years later, they persevered through the challenges brought on by the flood.

"We've been through all these external storms, and yet internally, with everything we go through, we just get stronger," she said.

Rotkin said she's looking forward to hearing others' stories Sunday, as well as sharing her own.

"As human beings, we are our stories," Rotkin said. "It's how we process our life and how we're in relationship with each other."

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